


A Hopeless Cause

by StrictlyNoFrills



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Drabble Collection, Elnor is d'Artagnan in Space, Gen, Picard Drabbles, This Drabble collection is not spoiler free, past-Agnes Jurati/Bruce Maddox
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:48:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22980493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrictlyNoFrills/pseuds/StrictlyNoFrills
Summary: This is the place for all my gen drabbles forStar Trek: Picard.
Relationships: Agnes Jurati & Soji Asha, Elnor & Jean-Luc Picard
Comments: 32
Kudos: 40





	1. Uneasy Alliance

**Author's Note:**

> If the writing for this one seems a bit stilted, it's because this piece is written from Elnor's perspective.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How Elnor may have snuck onto the Borg Cube from under Raffi and Rios's noses.

The secrets seething beneath the surface of everyone aboard _La Sirena_ made Elnor anxious. Not only were they directly opposed to the Qowat Milat way, and therefore foreign to him, he could see how easily they might destroy any attempts Picard would make to achieve his goal – the cause to which Elnor was now bound.

His attempt to broach the subject with Dr. Jurati ended poorly, and so he was reluctant to try with anyone else. He knew that his approach to life made the others uncomfortable, and he often felt out of place among them. That was normal for him, though he wished that it was not so. He had hoped that when he bound his sword to Picard’s cause, he might leave the sense of exclusion he felt among the Qowat Milat behind him.

So far, that had not been the case, which filled him with disappointment.

His attempt to join Picard on his trip to the Borg cube also ended poorly, and it left him feeling angry and useless. Picard said he needed a young man to help him, yet when he could most effectively serve his purpose, Picard left him behind.

Elnor paid close attention to the progress of the mission, and the moment Raffi said that Picard and Soji, the one Picard needed to save, were in trouble, Elnor sought out Dr. Jurati’s gaze and said lowly, “I need you to beam me to Picard’s location.”

Dr. Jurati narrowed her eyes. “Picard told you to stay here.”

“I bound my sword to Picard’s cause. Not to his orders. Raffi says he is in trouble. I am going to protect him, and I need your help.”

For a moment, Dr. Jurati only looked at him, her expression difficult to read beneath whatever it was that haunted her. If Raffi was right, it was a moment Picard could not afford.

“If it is my inbutting earlier which causes you to hesitate, I regret that it upset you so much that you would leave Picard in danger.”

Her nostrils flared and her lips tightened, indicating that his words caused her anger. “Fine.”

Dr. Jurati pulled up the location of Picard’s transponder and began to go through the motions Raffi and Rios taught her when they left her behind to man the transporter as _La Sirena_ orbited Free Cloud.

As the transporter hummed to life, Dr. Jurati pinned Elnor with an unusually sharp glance reminiscent of the one she sent him a few hours ago when he pointed out her emotional distress. “Don’t ever bring up whatever it is you think you understand about me again,” she breathed, still keeping her voice low in order to avoid alerting anyone else to what she and Elnor were doing. “Especially not to manipulate me.”

Before Elnor could come up with a response, the surroundings of _La Sirena_ disappeared, and a room that was even darker and full of more painful emotional echoes took its place.

A group of humanoid guards stood between Elnor and Picard, and Elnor crept closer to them, his feet moving surely and silently, (Because this, at least, was something he was good at, even if he didn't seem to be good at anything else.) and his hand poised to draw his sword.


	2. For Elnor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A dream is fulfilled.
> 
> HERE! *drops fluff and runs*

He stared down at the tiny ball of fluff in bemused wonder, and it tilted its head, letting out a querulous little sound, hardly louder than the song of his sword as it arced through the air.

“This is a kitten,” he observed, his voice soft with some emotion so foreign he almost couldn’t identify it. The sight of this kitten filled him with... awe. Awe and reverence.

“Not just any kitten,” Laris told him. “Yours. Which means it’ll be on your head if I find fur all over the furniture.”

Elnor put a hand - not his sword hand, that was best kept open and unencumbered - to his chest. “This kitten is for me?”

“Well, she’s certainly not for me,” Laris sniffed, her tone slightly tart, but he had been here, at the Picard estate, long enough now that he could see the fondness she did not try to conceal nearly as well as a former Tal Shiar could have. She wanted him to know she cared. It filled him with a joyful warmth. “I’m allergic.”

And that joyful warmth swelled even more in his chest until he thought he might burst from it. His smile threatened to split his face in two. “You are giving me a pet you are allergic to, because you are my friend, and you love me.”

“Because you are  family,” Laris corrected him.

“I also love you,” Elnor told her. He had not had a family in a very, very long time. He had only had Elnor. And now he had Laris and this tiny infant cat.

Laris huffed a bit and then waved towards the kitten. Elnor’s kitten. “Well, go on, then. Aren’t you going to pick her up? And you’ll need to give her a name, as well.”

Panic filled him. Elnor, pick up this little grey ball of fur, with her paws barely the size of his thumbnails, and her bones as delicate and light as the pages of the paper books Picard, Cristobal, and Agnes favored?

His hands were not made for such a dainty thing. They were large and calloused and strong. The nuns had told him that he may not have been a woman, but his hands had always been meant to wield a sword. How could such hands cup this precious life when they had taken so many?

But Laris had given him this gift because he was family, and because she loved him. If someone who was once Tal Shiar could love Elnor, then perhaps Elnor could take care of an innocent kitten.

He took a deep breath and then held it, stepping towards the table that held the box lined with old, ratty towels and straw, and he reached down with his hands - not shaking, never that, because the hands of the Qowat Milat never shook - and scooped up his kitten with the same sort of care he had used to catch a snowflake this past winter, his first in this strange, wonderful household. 

His kitten’s fur was softer than the finest fabrics, her body warm in his hands, and he brought her up to his face, gazing into her green eyes which stared back with such trust. “I will always take care of you,” Elnor promised, and this was one cage he would gladly step into, for as long as this little kitten lived to keep him in it.


	3. Perfecly imperfect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I have a strong feeling the majority of the fandom is going to absolutely hate this. I'm posting it anyway.
> 
> I do not, in any way, ship Agnes and Bruce. I don't approve of their relationship, given that he was her mentor and considerably older. But it did happen.

She _drank when she was thirsty_.

Oh, Agnes wanted to cry. In fact, she was pretty sure she already _was_ crying.

If she ever had the chance to bring a child into this world, she imagined she would feel much like this.

She wanted to count all of Soji’s fingers and toes. She wanted to press kisses to each one of the moles in her little constellation the way her own mother used to kiss the tip of Agnes’s nose. She wanted to run her fingers through Soji’s hair and wrap her up in her arms and keep her safe from the dangers of this world.

There was another part of her, growing more and more distant by the minute, that looked at Soji and saw flashes of the Admonishion, the unimaginable horrors which had driven her to depths of agony and despair she had never known existed, and led her to stand over her lover and watch as the light faded from his eyes, all the while thinking longingly of ending her own suffering.

But Soji was not the Destroyer, no matter what Commodore Oh and the rest of the Zhat Vash believed.

Soji was young and innocent and scared, with a defiance that left Agnes awed, proud, and a little rueful, because why couldn’t she stand up to her fears the way this young girl did?

Hearing Soji ask Agnes if she saw her as a person just about broke her heart. For all intents and purposes, she was the closest thing Agnes had to a daughter. Possibly the closest thing she ever would have to a daughter, since according to Picard, Agnes was to turn herself over to the authorities at Deep Space 12. And Soji was perfect, a miracle, just as Bruce had told her right before Agnes ended his life.

Perfectly imperfect.

* * *

The faint sounds of Bruce’s favorite holo bounced off of the walls of his bedroom, the slightly blue-tinged glow providing just enough illumination for her to make out his features and to see the French fries and chocolate pudding on the tray in her lap. She squirmed a bit, trying to awaken her left foot, which had fallen asleep, tucked up under her body as it was.

“Making them perfect is a mistake,” she insisted, waving a particularly long pudding-laden French fry in the air emphatically.

“What makes you think that, my dear?” he asked indulgently as she stuffed the entire French fry and chocolate pudding mess into her mouth, the salty-sweet-fatty-starchy mix lighting up her taste buds.

She chewed and swallowed faster than she normally would, sitting up straighter in her enthusiasm. She loved the moments when he actually humored her. He was such an intellectual giant that she sometimes wondered what he saw in her at all. Then there were moments like this, when he listened to her ideas and gave them some thought, and she felt slightly more worthy – and slightly less at risk of being accused of sleeping her way to the top.

“It’s like your ridiculous need to bake chocolate chip cookies, and the way I eat my French fries. It’s like the way my eyes are just a little bit too close together, and sometimes I babble when I’m nervous or I get too excited, or how I swear like a sailor when I stub my toe, and the way you _always_ forget to put the toilet seat down, and sometimes you stay up for days at a time when you’re trying to figure something out. If you take those imperfections away, you take away the things that make us _human_.” She considered the vast number of planets within and without the Federation and amended her last statement slightly. “That make us _people_. You want to create artificial intelligence even greater than Data? You’ve got to give them those little quirks and imperfections. You need to make them… perfectly imperfect.”

“Perfectly imperfect, huh?” He gave her one of those rare but genuinely admiring glances of his, and she flushed with pride at being the reason for it. “Okay, then. Perfectly imperfect they’ll be.”

* * *

Walking beside Soji and taking a seat next to her felt so surreal. It was an unexpected gift amid all of the pain this mission had caused her, to be allowed to sit beside the young life Commodore Oh had tasked Agnes to snuff out, the life Agnes and Bruce had dreamed into being all those years ago, when Agnes was still young and innocent and idealistic herself.

Agnes took a risk and scooted a little closer to Soji on the mess hall bench, and Soji merely glanced at her with a serene look before turning back to listen to the others gathered around the table.

It was impossible to fight against the smile that tugged at the corners of her lips in the face of this easy acceptance when mere moments ago, Soji had asked if Agnes wanted to kill her. This smile was only a fraction of the size it would have been before Commodore Oh came along and ripped her mind to shreds, but at least it was a start. At least it was real.

And so was Soji. Her little miracle girl.


	4. Kali

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _So_ , about THAT EPISODE!
> 
> My girl Agnes is a BAMF, and no one can tell me anything different. (She doesn't think of herself that way, but I absolutely do.)
> 
> Spoilers for Ep. 9.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not Hindu, but it's fairly common knowledge that the Hindu goddess Kali is known for her creation and destruction of life. I think that fits our favorite little doctor (well, mine, at least), pretty well.

The thought of Picard’s concerned and disappointed face was almost too much for Agnes to bare when he seemed to have forgiven her for Bruce’s death, but she _would_ bare it because she _must_.

If she were to have even a hope of success, it was vital that no one suspect what she was planning – a state of affairs with which Agnes had grown depressingly familiar, though this time she truly believed that she was doing the right thing. She adored all of her children, even though she had only been able to spend a short amount of time among them, but she could see how dangerous Sutra was, and she knew that Dr. Soong had Sutra’s full support.

As though she had summoned his attention with her thoughts, she could feel Dr. Soong’s eyes upon her, though she refused to look up from her work.

Dr. Soong worried her. He was full of the same sort of hubris Bruce had, and she knew enough now about hiding things from people to be able to spot that tendency in others.

Something wasn’t right here, and with Picard under arrest, she was the only one in a position to do anything about it.

It was a truly messed up universe when it came down to Agnes P. Jurati to save the day. She hadn’t even been able to bring herself to join Bruce when he decided to flee the Federation in order to continue his life’s work, yet here she was years later, millions of lightyears away from home, smack dab in the middle of the opening salvo of a confrontation between synthetic and organic life that had been brewing for millennia.

Would she ever stop feeling torn in two? Torn between the children of her heart and the lives of those within the Federation? She would die to protect the lives she and Bruce had worked so hard to bring into the world, but she would give just as much to protect organic life as she would synthetic. How could she not? She was organic, and so were her parents. So were Cristobal, Raffi, Elnor, Seven of Nine, and Picard. So many of the wonderful, complex, troubled, noble people she had met on this crazy adventure.

Agnes had no idea how she could save her children and save the Federation, but she knew that she had to try, and she knew that she had to do everything in her power to protect the one who could potentially be her greatest ally.

She was so glad that she had kept hold of that tricorder, and that it still had a record of the scans from Picard’s brain. A glance from across the golem at Dr. Soong sent a pang of guilt through Agnes’s chest, but she ignored it. She had meant what she said. To atone for the life she took, Agnes would give the gift of life to someone – it simply would not be Dr. Soong.

 _Forgive me, Bruce_ , she thought, for neither the first nor the last time since she had killed him. _You’ll be seeing your friend much sooner than you thought_.


End file.
